Edmund Yu

Product design leader with 15+ years building 0→1 products and design teams at startups in fintech, martech, and edtech. Founding designer who turns ambiguity into shipped products and scalable design practices, and ships production code with AI tools.

Contact Info

Principal Product Designer

Adora / AI-native performance marketing platform for enterprise brands May 2024–Present
  • Founding and only designer; joined pre-product and serve on the leadership team that sets roadmap and weekly sprint priorities.
  • Designed the platform from 0→1 across 12+ major projects, from the AI agent to ad approvals and analytics, for global brands such as Brooks Running and Alaska Airlines, who saw 2x ROAS, 10x faster launches, and 40% lower CAC.
  • Won the grand prize at Adora’s first AI hackathon (judged by engineering) for an AI-coded browser plugin that auto-assembles ads across templates and placements, replacing a manual Figma round trip.
  • Partnered with engineering to migrate from MUI to shadcn/ui component library, then began shipping frontend code with 250+ PRs since Q4 2025, backed by a self-learning pre-commit review system. Single-handedly made the desktop-only web app fully usable on mobile.
  • Co-created a design triage model (full design, design check, or none) with PM and engineering, and built an AI designer skill that keeps agent-generated PRs on-pattern, scaling design quality across PMs, engineers, and CS without a designer in every loop.
  • Authored experience principles used daily by product and engineering, and the “5 Quality Gates” delivery framework.
  • Ran 15+ customer research sessions with brand, creative, and media teams, and used Datadog and BigQuery data to inform design decisions.

Principal Product Designer

Bittrex / U.S.-regulated digital asset exchange Jun 2018–Feb 2024
  • Designed a research-backed retail experience that drove 25% of trading revenue on under 5% of trading volume.
  • Redesigned onboarding and KYC verification and automated 2FA resets, cutting turnaround from weeks to hours.
  • Designed the Initial Exchange Offering platform that let projects like VeriBlock raise $7M in 10 seconds.
  • Expanded fiat on-ramps to cards, ACH, SEPA, and wire; designed spot and margin trading, staking rewards, and tax reporting.
  • Built the design team, process, and career paths, and created 3 design systems across the web app, mobile app, and trading terminal.

Head of Product Design

Bloomz / Teacher-parent communication app May 2013–Apr 2018
  • Grew users from 0 to 3.2M in under 3 years (NPS 62, DAU/MAU 32%).
  • Beat a 500K active-parent goal by 2x (165K → 850K) without increasing marketing spend.
  • Cut CPA on the most expensive channel 99% ($42.93 → $0.45) with a teacher-to-teacher invite feature.
  • Raised post-registration conversion from 44.4% to 62.6% and cut time to invite parents from 17 to 11 days through onboarding redesign.
  • Owned all design and front-end development for web and the first hybrid apps on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
  • Designed monetization for teachers, districts, activity centers, and parents.

UX Design Lead

GlobalScholar / Learning platform for school districts and teachers Feb 2008–Apr 2013
  • Managed 7 UX designers and 3 front-end developers across 6 product lines.
  • Led design of the flagship product for assessing student proficiency and building personalized learning paths.
  • Designed learning management, content management, assessment, and reporting platforms to Section 508 and W3C WAI accessibility standards.

UX Designer

Microsoft Nov 2007–Feb 2008
  • Designed the Microsoft pubCenter publisher dashboard, ad creation wizard, search ads, and payout experience.

Contact Info

Skill Summary

Product Design
  • 0→1 product strategy
  • Interaction design
  • Rapid prototyping
  • User research
  • Usability testing
  • Design systems
Tools & Build
  • Figma
  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • AI-assisted development
  • Front-end development (HTML/CSS/JS)
  • Git and GitHub
Leadership
  • Building design teams
  • Coaching and career paths
  • Partnering with founders and engineering
Domains
  • Fintech (trading, payments, KYC/AML)
  • Martech
  • Edtech
  • Internal operations tools

Education & Training

University of Washington
  • International Economics
  • Bachelor of Arts
The Art Institute of Seattle
  • Interactive Media Design
  • Associate of Arts
LUMA Institute
  • Practitioner of Human-Centered Design